Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/choosing-web-framework-language-combo <comment><USER3> I (naturally) think that the article's summarily dismissing Haskell is unfortunate. It's probably just the result of poor PR on Haskell's part.

Haskell is not only for surpassingly intelligent people, or even optimized for them. If anything, it's the opposite: one of its core tenants is that we're not smart enough to reason about our programs in most languages. Much of the design work focuses on unloading complexity into the language, tools and abstractions.

Haskell goes out of its way to prevent common errors and help you design your program. In a very real sense, it trims the "search space" of possible programs, helping you zero in on a reasonable solution. To an extent, I use Haskell because I'm _not_ smart enough to use C.

Haskell _is_ unfamiliar. And people mistake that for some sort of innate difficulty. But the two are not the same.

I would argue that overcoming unfamiliarity is one of the most important ways to grow as both a programmer and, more generally, a person. That's why I think the article focuses too much on choosing a language that's familiar, codifying it as "just about all the good advice". This mindset is far, far too exaggerated in most programmers, and its what really slows down progress, especially for popular programming languages.

The blub paradox is also a bit misrepresented. Being a "blub" programmer is not a matter of being more or less intelligent—it's a matter of not knowing what you're missing. "Beating the Averages" is not "we used Lisp because we were smarter than you"; it's more like "we used Lisp because it offers some incredibly powerful tools that non-Lisp programmers have never used and so do not really appreciate". It's a matter of habits and experience, not intelligence.

My advice? _Do_ try something unfamiliar. Especially if it seems to be higher in the great partial order of programming language power :).

<comment><USER4> I'm all for trying something unfamiliar, and I could even argue for Haskell that way, but from a different angle.

I would say that adopting a language for the next 10 years that doesn't have purely functional data structures at its core is a fool's errand.

Persistent data structures, i.e. efficiently storing every version of your data structure, is the natural reflection of the new reality in computing where:

      * storage is cheap
      * random reads are cheap
      * random writes are expensive
      * serial writes are cheap

Whether you adopt this through Haskell, Clojure, scala or even Bloom e.a. is fairly inconsequential.

What will matter is that persistent data structures will inevitable become commonplace over the next decade and that techniques for leveraging it (such as functional reactive programming) will be adopted in one form or another.

@jacquesm: I live in Amsterdam so I can try to explain it to you in person once; virtually everyone still underestimates the impact this will have and (or perhaps because) it's very difficult to get that across in writing.

<comment><USER5> Living in Romania right now, but I'll ping you when I'm back in NL (I go there at least once every few weeks), Clojure seems to be the most approachable from the languages you list.

Besides your listed reasons mutable state is becoming a bigger and bigger bottle neck as the number of cores goes up and that's why functional programming is becoming more and more important. It also makes programs _much_ harder to write in a bug-free manner and it makes testing much more difficult (if not impossible).

It's one of the core reasons why I felt so bad about dropping Erlang from the list because I feel that it gives me that _plus_ a battle tested environment to work with.

Still tempted to put it back in. Your reasons add weight to an already very difficult decision, whether or not to pursue this opportunity as a way to get more into functional programming or to stay in my 'comfort zone'.

I've been toying around with FP on and off for the last couple of years and it is one of the most important revivals the computing world has seen to date (imo of course).

<comment><USER6> This may be my biases speaking but I'd say Scala is a more approachable option than Clojure (and more popular, and has a first-class web framework in Play). It keeps more of the traditional OO style and syntax - you _can_ use scalaz and write scala that looks like Haskell, but you can also write code that corresponds line-by-line to java, whereas with Clojure you're forced to make a more immediate leap to the lisp-style syntax, immediately stop using inheritance, and so on.

<comment><USER7> That's a major appeal of Clojure, the Lisp (not Lisp-style) syntax, the functional paradigm (and the idioms are great). I really don't want to write code that corresponds line-by-line to Java. If I wanted to do that, I'd just write Java. However, Java interop with Clojure is straightforward. Furthermore, Clojure allows one to solve problems with an "orientation" toward objects, but as one learns to write Clojure well, the language guides one toward sublime and elegant functional solutions. An important thing about Clojure, however, is that it is _not_ tied to the JVM; The original and most well-known implementation is for the JVM, but not only is there also Clojurescript, there are implementations that compile to CLR bytecode, Python, Ruby, and Actionscript. And with EDN, the extensible data notation, not only can you have your front-end and back-end codebases entirely in Clojure, you can transfer and store your data as Clojure too. I know not everyone has the same aesthetic tastes as I do, but I do like to think that there is something beautiful about this.

Finally, I must say that while Scala does indeed have a first-class web framework in Play, web frameworks are first-class objects in Clojure. Joke. Sort of. I personally do not want to have a monolithic pre-packaged web framework to bow down to; the Clojure community is a community of hackers, we like to make things out of other things, and to take things apart. Clojure and the work of its community allows me to compose my own web framework as needed very _very_ quickly–and to drastically change it just as fast. I'm not saying you should stop doing what you like to do, but if you gave Clojure a chance...dude: it's addictive.

<comment><USER6> > I really don't want to write code that corresponds line-by-line to Java. If > I wanted to do that, I'd just write Java.

The code I write now is nothing like Java, but it's a question of how you get from there to here. When I started Scala I wrote what I'd write in Java. In the first week I removed the semicolons. In the second week I started to use function literals. Then I started using match/case. Later I found out about for/yield with futures. And so on. I learnt the language at my job, and I was delivering real, user-facing features in it from day 1. I don't think I could've done the same with Clojure.

(Reasonable people can disagree on syntax; I find that Scala's lets you get very close to the language of the domain (e.g. see the Spray "routing DSL") and that's worth the cost it imposes on the macro system)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dropwizard is where it's at right now for Java frameworks. It's a superproject that glues together the best pieces out there. Surprised it wasn't on the wikipedia list.

Which brings up another point: if we're talking about web frameworks for the next decade we should really be looking at service-oriented architectures / single-page apps or whatever you want to call that model. It's quite different from the web frameworks of yesteryear that generated UI on the server. Dropwizard can do web views but it really positions itself as a REST service framework.

So, that brings javascript frameworks into the consideration. And the author has a paragraph where he just dismisses it as a "terrible hack"...??? I think that is going to seriously hamper the outcome here. It's good that modern web apps leverage the power of the browser and JS frameworks are the way to do that.

<comment><USER9> >Dropwizard can do web views but it really positions itself as a REST service framework.

That would eliminate it for me.

Not everyone is coding APIs and fat client web apps. I'd prefer a framework geared up to do standard web apps as well.

<comment><USER8> That may be what you want right now but the article is about something that will last 10 years. And what constitutes a "standard web app" is definitely shifting and will likely solidify over that time. "Fat client" isn't really the best term for it, because the client code is usually pretty lightweight. I'd say "modern web app".

I'd be including a consideration of AngularJS, Backbone, Ember etc. + a service-oriented backend framework like Dropwizard. That's also incidentally how you'd architect your backend support a native mobile client, which is a good thing to prepare for even if you think you only need an HTML frontend right now.

<comment><USER10> The "cutting-edge" web frameworks that _already exist_ today are the fat client frameworks you describe (client-side rendering). The web frameworks _of the future_ will have robust server-side _and_ client-side rendering, in my opinion. We're already seeing a little bit of this with Airbnb and Rendr for Backbone, React, and Twitter's web app, but it's not quite there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FTA: "I still haven't forgiven Microsoft for their countless misdeeds so Asp/C#/F# are all right out. That may be shooting myself in the foot here (cut off my nose to spite my face), but contributing to this decision is that I work exclusively with linux (both on desktops, laptops and servers) so the MS ecosystem has become totally unfamiliar to me and I don't like running windows on servers (though, of course there are some workarounds possible here and Mono is quite good). So, the L in my LAMP is firmly established. And besides, I don't have a lawyer on the payroll to make sure that my licenses are all read, ok'd and acceptable."

I really think the author is missing out here - for the sake of just sticking with what they know and not wanting to do any actual research, it's impossible to come up with an actual objective choice. So misinformed, I get that .NET/C# development is not everybody's cup of tea but I think it's crazy to title an article "Choosing a Web Framework/Language Combo for the Next Decade" without even evaluating an extremely popular option due to simple disinterest. The lawyer comment is just irrational fear (and I get is probably meant to be a bit of a gibe towards Microsoft's licensing schemes), unless you're writing something completely from scratch, you need to be aware of the licenses of ANY library/framework you depend on, even if they're free.

</comment><comment><USER12> FWIW, I'd remove GWT from consideration. I heard that it's shortlisted for end-of-life at Google because it's a hassle to work with.

Anecdotally, I agree with that. I once built a product on GWT because it impressed me so much on paper. Static typing, compiling permutations of your app and loading only what's needed, optimization of stylesheets, rendering only on the client etc. It seemed perfect. IIRC the two main issues at the time, a few years ago, were a) terribly slow tooling for any decent sized app and b) the usual interface-hell of Java. This may not be a problem if you're used to it, but for me it was an issue.

<comment><USER5> Wow. That's going to piss off quite a few people if google EOL's GWT and they know about it today but are not communicating it to the outside world.

Google has a habit of pushing tech out for people to build on and then pulling the rug right out from under them.

A citation would really help here but 'I heard' makes me realize that will probably not be forthcoming.

<comment><USER13> I know the Google GWT manager, and unless he's playing his cards very close to his chest, GWT is not EOL'd inside of Google.

Google did "re-open source" GWT a few years ago, and unfortunately it coincided their (AFAIK unrelated) closing of their Atlanta office (where most of the old GWT team worked).

So, it gave the impression of washing their hands of it, but in reality they a) staffed their GWT team back up to 4-5 people, and b) the open source model is much healthier for the project anyway.

(Previously the master GWT SCM has literally Google's internal Perforce/etc. repository, so any patches from external contributors had to be fostered by a Googler that cared about your issue, which made it really hard/impossible to have an external community of committers.)

<comment><USER5> I think it will be a long long time before the tech community will forget about wave, that makes rumours like these so credible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Python has always been a mixed bag for me. What I wrote in it worked, when I > wrote it. Then, a little while later it stops working, either because some > module that it depends on gets deprecated or changed in an incompatible way, > starts to exhibit weird behavior or even disappears.

This is no longer a problem in Python because of virtualenv and pip, which together allow you to tie down the version numbers of all the dependencies an application uses.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm also a bit frustrated with the Yii situation, although I do understand why they're doing it. Yii 2.0 is a total rewrite, and it is technically very impressive. However they have had the disadvantage of not being able to ship until it reaches feature parity with 1.1 which has been a huge undertaking.

The lead developer, Qiang, is literally the second most active developer on github[0], so it's not like they're not trying - the guy is currently on a 370+ day streak - it has taken a huge amount of effort for them to get to this stage.

I would personally build on the beta at this point because I have a lot of faith in the core team and they've had a lot of time to iron out any major problems, at this stage any changes are likely to be quite minor or fixes, so the real release will probably ship before your new project does.

Kohana seems dead and CakePHP has historically been rather slow and ungainly.

The lack of library support for Lua is a bit annoying, but it's getting better and can possibly be mitigated by using Lua's FFI to talk to C. If the eco- system was a bit more mature OpenResty[1] would be pretty compelling.

0\. [https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/2657075](https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/2657075) 1\. [http://openresty.org/](http://openresty.org/)

<comment><USER16> Kohana has died as far as I'm concerned. Such a shame, but it was a great replacement for CodeIgniter back in the day. CakePHP tried to hard to be Rails and messed it up, and I've never forgiven it, and it was horribly slow in my benchmarking.

Out of PHP frameworks, I would rule out anything that doesn't use Composer. If you can't use the best bit of tooling PHP has gained lately (other than HHVM) and are stuck copying libraries in by hand, well if you want it to survive then you've made the wrong decision IMO.

Personally, I would pick either Symfony or Laravel, the latter for development speed, the former for robustness and power (and explicitness, I'm working on a 400k line web app in Laravel which has had too many shit developers hacking on it over the last 12 months, and we get bitten by magic weekly because a long since fired or quit dev worked _against_ the framework rather than with it).

<comment><USER17> 400kloc on Laravel, holy shit snacks what the hell does it do?

I just cloc'd my projects root and including laravel and some dependencies (/vendor) that's 295,000loc).

<comment><USER16> Far, far too much. :'(

It's a corporate real estate web app, client facing and internal all in the one big app, so they can run their business (taking on a MASSIVE incumbent in the industry) all from the one bit of software. Has nearly 100kloc in an Angular front end, too. Huge bastard that I inherited two months ago, and have finally got it to a state where we can hand it over to the clients internal team. Easily the most challenging project I've tackled thus far in my career, but I managed to do it (with the help of two other awesome developers)!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To me, the most interesting thing about this post is that there is no clear answer. We're mired in, frankly, a lot of junk. There's no winner because nothing is really very good.

<comment><USER19> If you arbitrarily reject everything unfamiliar then filter the remainder for stability you wind up with unremarkable stuff that will get the job done. There are better ways to write web apps but you're not going to find them following the process outlined in the post.

<comment><USER5> Boring unremarkable stuff that gets the job done sounds great to me. Sexy, new, hot, flashy are exactly what I'm trying to avoid getting sucked in to (though, believe me I can feel the draw).

The life-cycle of the software underpinning what I build is as important or even more important than whether or not it is 'the best way' to do something today. Because that best way is the bleeding edge and the day after tomorrow (or even tomorrow) that will be something else.

I don't have the manpower nor the interest and time to keep rebuilding the stuff I put out there.

<comment><USER20> I was really drawn to the title of your post because that's just what I have done--well, over the last few months--and I went with Clojure. I want to absolutely focus now and I can see the momentum is gonna take me for at least the next 10 years. I never rode the Rails train and after becoming a functional programming believer I'm kinda glad I didn't in retrospect, but I had always been envious of people who did make that decision to become _good_ at a stack. I agree with you that the error exploding in Clojure is not nice, but to me it makes up for it in being on top of both Java and JavaScript (having been a JS dev previously, but being entirely tired of the convulsion of frameworks and build tools and module systems.)

It's a lisp that, as opposed to Lisp and Scheme, is not fragmented and seems to have mostly a healthy, united community. I see amazingly smart people, and so many of them, pushing Clojure forward (Rich Hickey, Stuart Sierra, David Nolen, Chas Emerick to name a few) and yet it's more approachable than Haskell. And I think these people will eventually find good, standardized solutions for things like the awfully ugly stacktraces.

Clojure doesn't really have a 'framework', and I like it that it's really composable in that sense. But things like Ring and Compojure are lightweight no-brainers, much like Rails is a heavyweight no-brainer for Ruby. What I want to say is, unlike JavaScript, after having picked Clojure as the language, the choice of everything else is mostly always a no-brainer (e.g. leiningen, core.async, enlive/hiccup, maybe Om soon.) And that really pleases my choice- avert brain.

<comment><USER5> Another well reasoned upvote for clojure then. Tempting to put it back in, I've already played with it quite a bit, wrote some toy programs in it.

Thank you!

<comment><USER20> Most welcome! I wrote that wall of text more in wanting to get my reasons out of my head, like you did, than in trying to wrestle you over to my side of the field. But if you want to be really tempted now, reconsider, like someone else commented here, the importance of concurrency and persistent data structures for web development going forward. Even for a one-man team (such as I plan to be, and actually one of my side-projects in Clojure has to do with language learning and SRS, would love to keep up with what you end up doing.) It means you can handle traffic spikes and trace errors as a one-man operation much more easily than if you had stateful bugs and failures to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Might as well go with the one which sparked the wave which inspired most of these.

Rails is pretty much the premier MVC framework. If you are going to go MVC, go with Rails. If we are looking for an alternative to Rails, then we are probably looking for an alternative to MVC, and none of these mentioned choices fit the bill.

I wonder when the day will come that we finally get sick of recreating all the libraries that typically go into an MVC framework. That day, Rails will still be going strong and we will probably give up and just go with Rails.

Of all the choices mentioned, not many have been around as long as Rails. For every day that Rails survives, the stronger it becomes. The more likely it will continue while the alternatives shrivel.

One day MVC may become obsolete, but some people might still want to use an MVC framework for whatever reason. That day, Rails will be there waiting for you.

Years ago, I watched the video on how to build a blog in 10(?) minutes. Today, I can still somewhat follow that video. With many of the MVC frameworks in this list, you couldn't do that. ZF1 is not ZF2 for example. The framework was completely changed. They might as well call ZF2 by a different name. If it were called anything more interesting than "Zend Framework" then maybe it would have a different name.

Go is interesting, but the MVC web framework ecosystem has to be created, just like we did for Node. I don't even know if that will happen anytime, or ever. Maybe people are getting sick of doing that. And then you need to wait X years to see if something actually has any lasting power.

Screw it, just go with Rails.

Or Django. ;)

<comment><USER22> For all the mentions of MVC in your post, you should probably realize that Rails isn't really MVC. Some of the new JS frameworks are actually MVC, but Rails it is not. (Rails is more Model2: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model2) than true MVC).

<comment><USER21> Right, but it's a close enough match to meet his requirements.

ETA: A blue collar match as opposed to an academic match. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting views on Python - I decided to start using it for personal projects after trying Go for a bit. Initially I _hated_ the significant whitespace, and indeed many other things, but I stuck with it and I find it all rather elegant - I certainly haven't noticed any huge problems with dependencies but I've probably stuck with pretty mainstream ones (e.g. Requests).

I now rather like significant whitespace and often find myself considering that my ideal language would probably be half way between Python and Lisp.

<comment><USER24> I had enough syntax errors appearing after a copy and paste that ended up with difficult to spot unaligned code that I decided to use Python only for little scripts and when I'm forced to use it and nothing else would do. The problem with Python is that editors don't have hints to autoalign the code for us. Same problem with templating languages like HAML and Slim which, oh the irony, were born for Rails. Nevertheless many people like Python and it's growing strong (maybe stronger as system/desktop language than for the web) so those problems of mine are not as big as I feel they are. But how do you survive to them or make them not happen? I'm sincerely interested.

<comment><USER23> I must admit that I only really took to Python once I got IDE support (initially in Visual Studio with PVTS and for the last while with PyCharm).

I'm _very_ happy with PyCharm.

<comment><USER25> Exactly, use PyCharm for auto-identing and this is no longer an issue. For shells, you can use bpython or IPython to the same effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I create a new personal web project around 3 times a year, and go through this exercise each time. I am still not happy with the choices out there. The last couple of times I have settled on Python/Flask.

The dismissal of Python and not Ruby over arguments of slowness of execution and dependency issues seems backwards to me.

The main reason I choose Python is because I can jump into a codebase that is years old and immediately understand what the code is doing. Brevity and readability trump just about everything else for me. I also like the pluggable nature of the Flask ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been in a quest for my favorite web server technology as well for the last 2 years, so this definitely rings a bell. I pretty much agree with evertyhing the author said, except for one :

Dismissing python due to maintenance difficulties and not Ruby seems weird. Both are highly dynamic languages with not much help from static analysis, and this is for me the reason why maintenance may be hard.

The fact that whitespace was an issue to OP probably means he never used PyCharm. I haven't had any single syntax issue since I started using this IDE.

<comment><USER28> I had the same knee jerk and even a bit further: ruby seems to embrace the "go fast and break things" philosophy much more than python.

<comment><USER5> That is quite possibly true but I've never even written a line in ruby so I'm unfamiliar with this. Thanks for the warning!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Being a Java/JVM expert, I wanted to add a couple of thoughts to your process. I'm not insinuating that you should change anything you've done!

\- Dropping JBoss Seam as a framework was a good choice because the important parts of Seam have been added to the JavaEE system, which provides an end-to- end set of technology specifications. If you choose to run a Java Application Server (such as JBoss EAP, Glassfish or Wildfly), then the server will support the full set of specifications, but you don't have to use them. Since JavaServer Faces (JSF) is one of those specification, I'm not really surprised you hadn't heard of it ... it's essentially JSP with lifecycle control and data-binding.

\- GWT is indeed a Java technology, but it produces client-side code. For big projects, I generally use GWT with Bootstrap to generate the client. It compiles into Javascript producing several versions optimized for different browser groups. Using Martin Fowler's Passive View pattern, it's easy to write fast tests for your client-side business logic, and since it's typesafe, you get compiler errors before the compilation to Javascript instead of the run- time errors you often see when writing in Javascript (or Coffeescript). Since I generally write the back-end for a generic JavaEE server, I also tend to use REST calls from GWT to an Application Server for client-server communication.

\- If you're looking for an ORM, none of the Java frameworks will include one directly, but it should be pluggable. When people talk about Java web frameworks, they're often constrained to just the "View" tier. Spring provides a much more full-featured stack (with DI and JPA) and is more analogous to JavaEE as a whole. I think you should consider those two as the full-stack contenders in Java. You can add GWT onto either if you need a client-side Java technology (I'm sure you'd NEVER use Java Applets for the client side right?).

\- I happen to like Scala and appreciate how purely it seems to add a syntax to Lambda calculus. Martin Odersky's "Principles of Functional Programming in Scala" on Coursera was a great class, but I'm hoping the Scala IDE advances quickly. I'll admit I've never written production software in Scala (or using WAVE) but I also admire one project that's using it successfully ([https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket](https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket)).

<comment><USER5> Super comment, thanks a ton, I will update the post at some point after this thread has cooled down a bit and I will definitely use your input.

<comment><USER29> You're welcome ... I'm happy to see someone looking at this question from a pragmatic stand-point. The continuity of libraries and frameworks and the "usefulness" of a language are _IMPORTANT_ but usually these trade-offs are discounted versus "coolness" by those comparing the frameworks. If you're focusing on getting something accomplished, chasing every new and improved library, framework and architectural pattern only does one thing - it keeps you from ever delving deeply enough into one technology stack to truly become an expert. Pragmatism and zealotry don't mix.

I should have also stated in my comment above that I almost gave up on Enterprise Java back in the J2EE 1.4 days (2005-2007 if I recall correctly). When you have to create multiple Java files for every EJB (mostly Entity and Stateless Session beans) and edit XML deployment descriptors (many times one deployment descriptor for each supported application server), Java programming feels as tedious as many people describe.

The contrast with JavaEE 6/7 is amazing - the technologies that are encompassed in each of the specifications tend to follow the same pattern. Write a POJO and add annotations. For instance, if you need a business method that consumes messages from a message queue and processes them, that's one (short) Java file with some annotations. For a more complicated example, if you have a database table and want to expose the records via a RESTful interface, here's what you'd have to write six (small) files as follows:

\- One entity bean with fields annotated for the ORM as well as accessors and mutators.

\- One stateless session bean with your business methods - in this case providing CRUD operations against the entity bean (using a PersistenceContext from JPA)

\- One JAX-RS annotated class to provide the RESTful API's methods (again an annotated POJO).

\- One Application class (with very few lines of code - it activates JAX-RS).

\- One persistence.xml file to define a datasource.

\- One (empty) beans.xml file to activate CDI.

If you stick with the JavaEE annotations and configuration files, there are some real benefits to this structure:

\- The ORM's entities and configuration are database agnostic ... the same WAR file could be deployed against your MySQL servers, Oracle (for those who have money to burn) or PostgreSQL.

\- The application will run on any JavaEE compliant application server. Deploy the file to Glassfish, Wildfly, JBoss EAP or even WebLogic (for those who have money to burn).

\- The ORM will cache entities (and can be configured to use a second-level cache when it's prudent). When you start caching database rows, you have to be careful and there may be tuning involved.

\- The Application Server will create pools of each of the objects that will be used so that it's not creating and destroying objects over and over again. This is a huge performance gain for servers with a lot of request-scoped web transactions that use stateless session beans for business logic.

There are also ways to create enterprise Java applications that are a little more light-weight (though today's Application Servers have lost a lot of their girth). If you simply use a servlet container you can still use JSF which has a better templating engine that JSP. You can add CDI by including the library and a little bit of bootstrap code. Application servers like Apache TommEE start with Tomcat and add libraries as needed.

It also occurs to me that the "experimental phase" you're embarking on could be leveraged to be both crowd-sourced and open-source. Since you're starting from scratch with each of these technologies, wouldn't it be interesting to have a complete newbie and an expert produce the same application using each of the surviving frameworks?

If you publish a light-weight specification for your test project and open a Github project with each framework's implementation in a sub-directory, I'd be really curious to see what efficiencies and problems were experienced with each implementation. It would also give you a way of comparing your implementations to others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm very curious how the Google searches were done. I get 2.5 million results for "ruby sinatra" on Google vs. 5160 in the article. The numbers I get for "ruby rails" are similarly much higher. So clearly he must be searching for something else. Even "ruby sinatra framework" gets 388,000 for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> Choosing a framework/language for the next ten years sounds like a fools errand to me. Both because what "best" is changes much, much more rapidly than that - and because I'd pick different frameworks depending on the team and project.

Starting at the framework end doesn't help me much. Instead I go with the people I have for the project and the things I want to do/validate - and start looking for what gets me progress as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER32> Indeed. Picking a framework/language for the next ten years at this particular time feels a bit like picking the best horse and cart just as the automobile is getting popular.

It's an exaggeration, of course, but the fact that we're undergoing some big changes in web development (more on the client-side with server-side api) makes me thing this might not be the best moment to think of picking something for the next ten years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "JavaScript web frameworks seem to have a half-life of about 6 months..."

Express [1] has been the dominant framework for Node.js since 2009-2010. What frameworks are you talking about?

[1] [https://github.com/visionmedia/express](https://github.com/visionmedia/express)

<comment><USER34> I wouldnt consider Express as a framework.

It's just a router and a few middleware. Hapi or Actionhero are frameworks though rest ones.Express is definetly not a framework,it doesnt do anything much.

Writing Spring like, Symfony like frameworks is hard in nodejs. Libs are bad,often tightly coupled,and frankly nobody's maintaining nothing on the long run.

<comment><USER35> > Express is definetly not a framework,it doesnt do anything much.

Consider that your definition of a framework may be different from others.

<comment><USER36> jaquesm's requirements, per the linked article, are that " _Sessions, authentication, routing, internationalization, MVC, caching, mobile, templating, ORM and so on should preferably all be part of the deal, so batteries included please_ ". GP's comment was presumably made with that context in mind. Arguing for Express on the grounds that the word 'framework' doesn't imply those those things doesn't invalidate his requirements - definitions aside, Express clearly doesn't satisfy them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Google could give a huge boost in confidence in Go, _tomorrow_ (or rather within 2 years) - just make Go the official main language to use for writing Android apps and start deprecating Java.

Once it does that, I don't think there will be any doubt in anyone's mind that Go has less chance of survival than say Java. In fact, Java will immediately _lose_ confidence once Android drops Java (in a reasonable 3-5 year timeframe).

<comment><USER5> Are you suggesting that the Go language would be retargeted to the VM?

Or that Android apps would be compiled into binaries executed without a VM?

Either way, fascinating idea, and it would be a good way to settle the Google/Oracle dispute once and for all. If they choose the second path (security will be a huge concern) they might even pick up a nice speed boost too.

<comment><USER38> I've secretly hoped Google would be going down this path for a long time but sadly no evidence of it.

> Or that Android apps would be compiled into binaries executed without a VM?

What I imagine in my Android-Go-fantasy is something like NaCl - your code compiles to native code, but a subset of provably safe native code ... so sort of a best of both worlds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The other consideration needs to be "How did this mature framework evolve?".

Symfony dumped all symfony1 users up s __* creek when Symfony2 came out; Zend framework 2 is an entirely different beast to ZF1...

Are these mature frameworks any more stable than the new ones, or are they new frameworks, phoenix-like in assuming the name of the old one?

<comment><USER40> As far as those two frameworks, it's mostly about retaining brand recognition.

On the other hand, major version releases are when you make such dramatic departures from what's come before. At least in ZF, they got a lot a lot of things more-right.

I moved a (pretty complex, line-of-business transactional-type) project from ZF1 -> ZF2, and I'm happy I did. Some things changed a lot (dispatch, routing, forms), while other things were very easy to translate (caching, logging, etc).

In that case, most of the business logic was built around Doctrine2, encapsulated nicely into service classes, and therefore fairly framework- agnostic.

<comment><USER39> With the OP looking for a framework where he doesn't have to rewrite the code every few years (or more frequently, hello Drupal), major version upgrades matter.

I'm glad that transitioning your project from ZF1 to ZF2 was worth the effort and relatively easy. I have a number of clients still on symfony 1.4 because although unsupported and a 'dead' system, without a straightforward migration path to Symfony2 it doesn't make economic sense for them to do so - not when the whole web system (CMS, order management, the rest) is written using symfony 1.4 and Doctrine 1.2. Until it stops working, as it's going to be a new build either way.

I think that kind of framework dead-ending is fairly irresponsible; certainly some of my clients thought I was irresponsible to have chosen Symfony when their 1-2 year old systems needed to be rewritten...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> TL;DR: using exclusively prejudices and unsupported blanket statements to choose a language/framework combo

</comment><comment><USER42> My colleagues and I went through more or less this exercise in 2005 and ended up with Python/Django. I know everybody tends to become a crusader for their development stack, but I think this was a fantastic decision, either by luck or judgement.

To be honest I still don't see any compelling reason to switch to anything else in 2014, but if I was looking I'd be strongly favouring Go as the language, as it seems like the preeminent forward-looking, popular-ish, well- supported language. Rust and Erlang would also get a look in.

<comment><USER43> I agree and we also went through a similar process at work (although a few years later than you), couldn't be happier with Python and Django.

Although looking forward, I have a strong feeling that HHVM/Hack will become one of the darling platforms given the amount of resources Facebook has and the poor state of performance many PHP frameworks are currently in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If you are still considering PHP frameworks, then your choices are really Symfony or Laravel (maybe Zend at a stretch).

Yes, Laravel does have a high "bus factor", but for me personally its the number one choice in terms of ecosystem, features, support and community,

<comment><USER45> Laravel isn't going away, even if Taylor gets hit by a bus.

There's a huge and active Laravel community, it's just that Taylor is the benevolent dictator.

If Taylor _was_ hit by a bus, there would be plenty of others who would be willing and capable to take up the baton.

Seems to me pretty remarkable to rule out Laravel on this basis, yet keep CakePHP, ignoring all its other flaws.

<comment><USER5> Excellent input, thank you!

<comment><USER46> fwiw [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Laravel%2C%20symfony%...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Laravel%2C%20symfony%2C%20cakephp%2C%20kohana)

<comment><USER47> Updated to include Symfony2:

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Laravel%2C%20symfony%...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Laravel%2C%20symfony%2C%20cakephp%2C%20kohana%2C%20symfony2&cmpt=q)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think another question is how much you want done on the server (HTML rendering?) and how much on the client. It seems like we're definitely moving towards having the client handle all the UI. I understand this may not be appealing, especially as client side frameworks have even a shorter lifespan than server-side frameworks, but that seems to be the direction. If that's acceptable, for the backend I'd choose Java and Dropwizard (or Jersey+Jetty instead of Dropwizard). Spring Boot also seems nice. I discuss the state of modern Java web development in a non-comprehensive recent blog post[1]. For a more complete discussion of JVM web frameworks, you can take a look at this[2] and this[3].

[1]: [http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2014/05/15/modern-java- pt3/](http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2014/05/15/modern-java-pt3/)

[2]: [http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/the-curious-coders- java-...](http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/the-curious-coders-java-web- frameworks-comparison-spring-mvc-grails-vaadin-gwt-wicket-play-struts-and- jsf/)

[3]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygW8fJVlDxQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygW8fJVlDxQ)

</comment><comment><USER49> Hi jacquesm, if you're reading this..

I recommend that you take a second look at Scala. Considering that you "have a working knowledge of Java (but really don't like it)", I think Scala is a good choice.

The usual cliche-but-true reasons:

A. It runs on the JVM, arguably the most performant VM.

B. It has mature, huge (Java) ecosystems. High quality IDEs, rich (3rd party) libraries, a plethora of build tools (for better or worse) and profilers.

But for me personally, the things I like about it:

1\. I can use different languages (as long as it runs on the JVM, obviously) for different needs. Probably not wise to mix a dozen languages ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages)) in a project, but at least I have a choice.

2\. Since I'm a Java developer during the day, I can reuse my skills (can use same framework, same debugging approach, same build system).

3\. I can start coding with Java/imperative style. When I started learning Scala, I literally coded like in Java, minus the semi-colons. Over the time, I enhance my coding style because I keep thinking, "There's gotta be a better way of doing this." At least this lowers my barrier to learn Scala.

EDIT: IntelliJ allows you to copy Java code and paste it as Scala.

Obviously you can replace "Scala" with "any JVM language other than Java", but I have my specific reasons in choosing Scala (over, say, Clojure).

</comment><comment><USER50> Since the exercise is framed this way (for the next decade), It might by interesting to try it from the perspective of 2004. IE, if you made a decision this way in 2004, how wrong/right would it have been now that the decade is over?

<comment><USER51> We would all be writing Java applets, no?

<comment><USER52> Java applets were already dead by then. The new hotness was JSF + Hibernate, and ASP.Net WebForms on the Microsoft side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> A few years back I went through a the same process.

My criteria differed somewhat, but the gist was the same -- maximize your investment, position yourself well, and as Wayne Gretzky would say, "Skate to where the puck is going."

I'm in a rush to be somewhere, but here's a quick rundown of my key criteria for a 10-year language:

      1. Concurrency Model (we're in a multicore world)
      2. Data Processing (data is driving everything)
      3. Platform (cloud platforms are the new OS)

Python, Clojure, and Go are my top three.

Python for its practicality, massive library in general and also in the data processing/data science space.

Clojure because of its concurrency model, first-class Java interop and thus massive library, plus its simple elegance and limitless potential appeals to the painter in me.

Go for its concurrency model on top of being a well-designed systems language that's backed by Google. I think Go is going to be _the_ language to emerge as the dominant player in the next 10 years.

All three languages work on App Engine, and Google's Cloud offering is another one of those "skate to where the puck is going" things. It's already the most technically advanced cloud, and you can see signs that it's about to catch a Google-fueled hockey stick and blow past AWS at an exponential pace.

Honorable Mention: Scala.

Scala is in use by big companies like Twitter and LinkedIn, and it's the code behind some of the key open-source systems like Spark, Finagle, and Kafka. And Spark's the data-processing skate-puck destination: Cloudera is adopting it, and the days running up to the Hadoop eclipse keep growing shorter so I suspect Scala and I will keep crossing paths as these tools continue to make the rounds.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is incendiary advice, but if you've dropped Python due to breaking changes as you update it, you may also want to consider dropping Rails. I say this because the perception is that the Rails development goal is to stay with the bleeding edge of web development first, and support backwards compatibility second.

</comment><comment><USER55> Coming from years of .NET, a year spent with Grails and now 4 months into 'Ruby-land'. If there was a way to vote, I'd vote Rails/Ruby just Rails/Ruby isn't cool anymore, everyone moved onto NodeJS/Scala or wherever. I'm only going by experience, and I haven't been deeply involved yet.

It's a good thing. By the looks of it, the community might be jaded in some way, which means no more running around trying to be the coolest /fastest kid in the block, mostly everyone just wants to get stuff done. The amount of useful gems and well-maintained libraries (years of being maintained, not just a few months) is amazing.

The language matured enough, and the ecosystem along with it. The ecosystem still has some flaws and voids here and there, but that's what makes it exciting in being part of it.

<comment><USER52> What made you move away from Grails? I understand the community is an order of magnitude smaller, but I've been experimenting with it recently, and it looks very solid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > TCL is not really web suitable (though it's been done)

I don't use Tcl (not TCL!) anymore myself, but it'd be more honest to say that it's not that popular these days or not a language you happen to like. This is built with Tcl just fine:

[http://flightaware.com/](http://flightaware.com/)

With that out of the way, I think that was a good read, and a reasonable process. It's fair to be a bit subjective about some things, because... we're humans, and that's the way we are.

Personally, I use Rails as my go-to framework because while it's not super fast, it's very, very full of useful things to get up and running quickly, and keep iterating once things are built.

<comment><USER57> AOL ran on AOLServer[1][2] (TCL + embedded C bits) for many years, I believe, quite happily.

[1] [http://www.aolserver.com](http://www.aolserver.com) [2] [http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.htm...](http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.html)

<comment><USER56> Yes, I was going to mention that too - it's a bit ironic saying that Tcl ( _not_ TCL!) is not ok for the web when it was used for some of the first serious dynamic content web systems.

<comment><USER5> I thought I wrote 'modern web'. I'll update if I got that wrong, and I'll update the spelling too.

Edit: good catch David, I used modern web in one instance and 'web' in two others. Changed that to be consistent. TcL now properly spelled. Have a well deserved upvote :)

<comment><USER56> > TcL now properly spelled

The l is a small l. Kind of like Fortran vs FORTRAN or Cobol vs COBOL or Perl vs PERL. Tcl people prefer Tcl.

I actually think Tcl would be fine for the modern web (it had an event loop before it was cool to have an event loop), but you could easily eliminate it for many of the reasons you eliminate other things - not too many people working on it, not as many ready-made components as something like Rails, and so on.

<comment><USER5> Two typos in three letters, that's got to be some kind of a record. Holding out for 3. Changed and deployed, thanks once more. And Tcl wasn't going to get back in on other grounds so at least it won't require me to re-write a major chunk of the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I did this a year or so ago. Arrived at Rails. Close contender was Laravel. Rails won because of:

1\. A awesome ORM 2\. I could use Ruby for iOS applications(Rubymotion). 3\. JRuby 4\. Great for writing scripts and little one off things I needed to do. 5\. Capistrano (although you can use this with any language) 6\. Opal(although this really hasn't taken off yet). 7\. People are actively trying to speed the language up. MRI, JRuby, Rubinius.

So I invested in Rails because of the other things I could do with Ruby in addition to web.

</comment><comment><USER59> Lua over Nginx (aka. Openresty) tempts me, Lapis [1] is really exciting

[1] [http://leafo.net/lapis](http://leafo.net/lapis)

<comment><USER60> I'm interested lapis as well, I think this might finally be what I have been looking for...

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I can't follow Jacques' reasoning when it comes to any of this. His first choice would have been a PHP framework (in 2014!), yet he goes on to criticize a bunch of languages which have sane == operators seemingly on the basis of his gut reaction to their very existence, while asserting things like "Python is like driving on the autobahn without guard rails" and "Lua is the sweet spot between Ruby and Python." That might be true if Python had shipped with exactly two data structures, and Ruby with zero, and neither of them had integers.

This is all before the frameworks are even discussed, which are included and dismissed for reasons just as arbitrary. Smaller frameworks like Sinatra are discarded because they can't handle the complex logic that flash cards demand, Django's out because of the whole auto safety thing, and we all know that ExpressJS didn't show up at Jaques' birthday party that one time. Play's out because Scala is unfamiliar, despite that not being a specific quality of Scala and just something that's true in general of programming languages one hasn't bothered to learn.

So the final list contains some more PHP horror shows and a few Java and Go frameworks to make things look democratic. Thankfully, Rails makes an appearance, but it feels like this is just because it was lucky enough not to get hit by a dart.

Let it be a lesson -- we all procrastinate, but when you get to the point where you're writing blog posts about dozens of languages and tools, none of which you have direct experience with, the best thing is just to pick something, do what you'd meant to do in the first place (although you will note that writing the flash card app was itself a way to procrastinate on learning Romainian), and discuss the pros and cons of the tools you chose once you actually know what they are.

</comment><comment><USER62> I was a little surprised to see Gorilla get kicked out. My understanding is that among Go developers, stdlib net/http + the Gorilla toolkit was the de facto standard approach.

People are experimenting with new frameworks, e.g., beego, revel, martini, etc, but I don't think _any_ of them are stable enough to meet your stringent criteria in that regard.

It seems to me (as an outsider looking in) that the Go community is relatively "anti-framework", instead preferring _libraries_ , like Gorilla, for special oomph in routing or sessions or what have you.

I also think it's worth determining what you think the next decade's high level architecture will be: JSON api backends with fancy JS frontends, or more along the lines of standard Rails, Yii, etc? That will drastically change the type of web framework to choose.

</comment><comment><USER63> "grails not written in java" \- was a bit disappointing to read this - <USER2> mostly is (the spring base) and you can write pretty much all in java if you want, although groovy lets you be a bit more concise for a (usually) small speed penalty.

</comment><comment><USER64> It was a great article! Very nice to read about how someone else thinks when making descisions. Regarding your choice I think you should look a little bit more at javascript frameworks like Mithril and React, they can be used on the server or on the client which holds many doors open for you. Mithril might fall for your demands on previous usage and minimum age but it seems to get web programming very close to other programming and is small enough that you should be able to do maintenance of if yourself if you have to a few years down the line. [http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/](http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/)

</comment><comment><USER65> I would consider Dartlang - "Dart is a new platform for scalable web app engineering." is the title string on Dart's home page. Dart is designed for web apps. One downside is it's still not as mature as alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER66> I love Kohana (for a PHP framework) ... too bad it's no longer being developed.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for saving me some time. I missed that and thought Kohana was still being supported, but I just checked and found this: [http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/12509/final- rele...](http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/12509/final-releases-of- kohana-beginning-of-ohanzee/p1)

So you are absolutely right. Will drop it from the list to try and will update the article.

<comment><USER66> No problem, looking forward to the verdict. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I'm pretty sure that PHP Fat-Free number is wrong, but regardless after my search for a framework that's the one I've been backing for the past many months on a project.

It's actively developed (just follow the dev branch, which is quite stable) and the devs/community have been quite helpful. I wanted something much lighter than Laravel, but still have all the handy features, and that fit the bill. Based on your requirement of sheer usage numbers though, I don't know if it meets that (yet).

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't see the point in attempting to choose a language/framework for the next decade. I would think that different languages and frameworks will be a natural fit for specific applications and perhaps the reason the author is struggling to make a decision is that he's attempting to make it based solely on the abstract rather than a concrete application.

I'm not the only one who'd like people to choose frameworks and languages on something other than gut feel and googlefight results, right?

<comment><USER5> I have a very concrete application in mind but want something that is versatile enough that I can go and do another application without having to go through the whole selection process again (and learn a bunch of new stuff on top of that).

Of course specialization is optimal but as soon as you have to make multiple things and your resources are limited then a general purpose tool is the better choice.

Compare it with hammers. If I _only_ need to do metalworking I'd buy a bench hammer. But if I need to do metalworking and woodwork then a clawhammer is probably a better choice.

As for the selection process, this was just the preliminaries, it's far from over and the next step will be a lot more work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Saying you are on your own figuring things out with Erlang is false. The community on the erlang mailing list and IRC channel is extremely helpful, especially for people starting out.

Finding Erlang programmers is admittedly more difficult, but finding someone willing to learn Erlang is not too big of a problem. It's also not a big deal to learn Erlang, because the language is simple.

As someone writing Erlang code for years, the good parts of using Erlang far outweigh the bad parts.

<comment><USER42> > Finding Erlang programmers is admittedly more difficult

Presumably if you are an Erlang programmer, that is a plus point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Python all the way.

And the part about Python code breaking due to external modules must be a joke, right?! How hard is to specify a fixed version in the requirements.txt

</comment><comment><USER71> This is an exciting read, kind of like Game of Thrones for web frameworks.

Re: why there were so many "PLAY!" results in Google, that would likely depend on the query you use. Something like "play framework" would probably match for any page where someone said "I will play with this framework".

...which is another reason why "Go" was such a bad idea for a language name, BTW.

<comment><USER24> I agree.

go: about 2,550,000,000 results. go language: about 3,630,000,000 results. golang: about 1,950,000 results.

I wish the poster published the Google query strings he used because I get very different results. Examples: gorest: 984,000 results vs 6580 in the post. ruby on rails: 11,900,000 vs 258,000.

<comment><USER5> The google results should be easily reproducible, I simply used the exact same query string for every framework, "{framework name} framework", going on the assumption here that relatively speaking this will give an idea of how much information there is out there on a given framework. Probably it would have been better to use google trends for this using suitable criteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Rather than sloppily relying on hearsay, popularity and Googling, the suitability of web frameworks could be tested in competitions like [https://www.plat-forms.org](https://www.plat-forms.org) ... I wish more people would participate there, the results are somewhat surprising (and of course take into account the skill of the developers).

<comment><USER73> Maybe people don't get involved because it's hard to figure out the results. I see a graph labeled "team A, B, C..." and no key to which team is which. What am I missing?

<comment><USER72> The website is bad indeed, it seems to be an understaffed academic project, but the concept is worth imitating IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Grails is written in Java.

And while Grails today is a great servlet framework, Grails 3.0 will allow new application profiles, like netty, hadoop and batch.

<comment><USER75> So it says in the over 1 year old rant on Grails 3.0 [http://grails.io/post/48599814766/more-on-where-next-for- gra...](http://grails.io/post/48599814766/more-on-where-next-for-grails) but it's very slow coming. Same with other Groovy ecosystem software like Groovy which hasn't made a dent in it's new MOP, Antlr grammar, or Java 8 lambda retrofit. And Gradle which still ships with Groovy 1.x.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> What are the problems of spring license? It's a clear apache 2.0 license which is quite used in the java world. (edit: ok, noticed that the wikipedia page was wrong, I've corrected it)

Additionally, even though I'm not a fan of the following frameworks, but any java web dev know about jsf (due to being pushed as the "standard enterprise web framework") and vaadin.

<comment><USER77> I was surprised too that he hadn't heard of JavaServer Faces, given that it's the One Official Web Framework of Java. I'm not sure I'd recommend it necessarily, but it's hugely popular and well-supported, so it knocks at least a couple of his criteria right out of the park.

<comment><USER5> Spring license mistake noticed (on the WP page it reads 'springsource', not apache 2.0!), as for JavaServer Faces, it may be extremely popular I just never ran into it in actual use and I see quite a few companies every year.

Is it somehow associated with a branch of industry that I don't have exposure to? Do you have some examples from the 100 top websites written using JavaServer Faces?

That would help me to place it better.

<comment><USER76> From what I know, JSF is used mostly for small to medium intranet application in the context of big enterprises.

I'm quite biased here, but the big seal of approval as the official java enterprise web framework makes it often imposed by the upper layer of the enterprise than a willing choice by the developers.

Additionally, if the enterprise is licensing a lot of oracle products, it's not surprising if they have a ADF (adf is a jsf implementation and component library) license with jdeveloper, which is trumpeted as the successor of oracle forms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know what "MVC" means to this guy, but Wicket's approach is much, much better than any other framework I've used; you build your web pages out of objects, your component hierarchies out of object hierarchies, with actual encapsulation, reusability and composability. If that's not MVC then I don't want to be MVC.

<comment><USER5> Hi, I'm 'that guy'.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks) has a big fat 'no, modular event driven' in the 'supports MVC' column.

<comment><USER6> Well, I guess the question then becomes: what does MVC mean to that Wikipedia editor? And what is it you want to be able to do that you're trying to figure out by reading that column?

Once again, Wicket's approach is head and shoulders above every other web framework I've ever used. It's good enough to make me not mind using Java (I dearly wish I could find a framework with the same level of encapsulation in other languages). I urge you to examine it more closely rather than dismissing it based on this one line.

<comment><USER5> Ok, point taken, I'll add Wicket back in. This thread is a goldmine of good information so far, I spent a full 2 days researching all this and it would have been absolutely impossible to evaluate all framework/language combos by writing a test app so I had to take some shortcuts. Apparently that caused a good framework to be thrown under the bus for all the wrong reasons so I'll revive it and we'll see how it does in the real world. Thank you!

<comment><USER48> Haven't used Wicket, but this is what a good web framework comparison had to say about it[1]:

 _With its clear MVC model, clean HTML and a wicked component module, you can create new applications with reusable components quick and easy. Wicket does use a model inheritance for it's components, which isn't great due to a bit steeper learning curve.

The existence of markup files for every component gives you a clear separation of concerns between the controller deciding what to display and the view that specifies how to display. This not only reduces development time but also gives your web designers the confidence to modify the HTML code without worrying about crashing and destroying everything._

[1]: [http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/the-curious-coders- java-...](http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/the-curious-coders-java-web- frameworks-comparison-spring-mvc-grails-vaadin-gwt-wicket-play-struts-and- jsf/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Spring is included in the end shortlist, but I thought you excluded it due to licensing?

What do you mean about Laravel's "bus factor"?

<comment><USER5> Good catch. Laravel seems to be pushed forward by a single individual. Elsewhere in this thread that is disputed.

<comment><USER78> Aha, understood... yeah, I think Laravel is very similar to Rails in that respect. Would you not use Rails because DHH is at the wheel? They both have big active contributor communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> When I read the introduction I immediately thought about Apache + MySQL + PHP + Symfony.

ORM, templating engine, community, it's all there.

<comment><USER80> I concur, but I would swap both the database and the web server to Postgres and Nginx respectively. Symfony and the community around it is just awesome though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Goodness, just pick a framework and start building. There's no way you're going to make the right choice so just choose whichever language you're most comfortable coding in and start building. Creating 12 prototypes to narrow down 12 frameworks? Does this strike anyone else as an insane waste of time?

<comment><USER5> In the long run this should _save_ me time.

<comment><USER81> Well, that's the classic argument for yak shaving. Most if not all of the frameworks you analyzed will be more than adequate for the app you're going to build. What it should come down to is what you're comfortable with. Focus on the product you want to build, not the tools you are using to build the product.

<comment><USER5> I think I got the Yak shaving part covered with the first sentence of the post :)

I'm well aware of the ups and downs of exposing myself to choice like this but I _really_ want to get myself exposed to some real world practice with some of the top contenders here to make a more objective choice and I also feel that 'what you're comfortable with' is getting too close to unsupported that I should widen my view.

Fortunately this is not a commercial undertaking, nor am I on a tight deadline so I can afford the luxury of thinking this over. If it were for a customer and it would be required tomorrow morning then the story would be wholly different.

<comment><USER81> Well, I suppose the silver lining is that you're publishing your journey :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Every comment I have read so far is pushing a personal agenda and ignores the authors criteria. If we are to go by the authors desired requirements then the obvious winner is Rails. Rails is constantly being developed and maintains timeless standards while embracing new technologies.

</comment><comment><USER83> Since the author is already familiar with PHP, why not try Hack? You'll get to keep all of your PHP stuff, with increased performance on the HHVM.

Sure, there is no real hack framework yet.. but you could help build one. Plus, all your PHP frameworks will work fine in the meantime.

<comment><USER84> A Hack framework might be a good summer project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> [http://arisalexis.com/2014/04/27/odyssey-2014-a-journey- into...](http://arisalexis.com/2014/04/27/odyssey-2014-a-journey-into- languagesframeworks-and-databases/)

keep tuned I will write a similar back end post soon.

</comment><comment><USER86> "I still haven't forgiven Microsoft for their countless misdeeds so Asp/C#/F# are all right out."

So Xamarin is Microsoft now? Better tell them, because they don't know it yet. Clojure is a .NET language as well by the way.

<comment><USER87> Keep in mind that Microsoft now require you to login with their latest IDE. The moment this will bite you in the ass depends on what license you use (retail, partner etc). If your a partner you get a rolling 30 day trial that's tied to your MS Partner account and if you've ever used the MS Partner website you know what a complete piece of shit that is. From the Partner account you assign development rights to a developer which then flicks a switch in your MSDN account, allowing your developer to login to Visual Studio. Problem is these stars dont always align and your left hanging on the phone to support for hours (this has happened to 2 of our 3 devs now, took 24+ hrs to sort) The only solution is to switch back to VS2012.

Xamarin also require that you log in to their IDE, so far so good with them though.

<comment><USER88> You can install Visual Studio 2013 with a product key instead if you prefer (that's how I have it installed on my machines currently).

<comment><USER87> I believe thats retail only.

<comment><USER88> My product keys have come from MSDN.

<comment><USER87> Your not using the Partner license, your likely on Bizspark or a bog standard MSDN subscription. Partners pay the most, then get treated like an a __hole.

<comment><USER88> If buying MSDN works out to be cheaper than the Partner program, why not buy MSDN licenses instead?

<comment><USER87> MS Partner licensing gives you broader usage, through to production servers, Office etc. Pretty sure MSDN is dev or training only. Plus why pay twice, shit should just work without all the BS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> It's simple: pick the language that has the most intense energy/vibe around it. You will benefit from being at the front line of innovation and have the help of an enthusiastic community to back you up.

It's Javascript and Node.

</comment><comment><USER90> Sorry if I'm harsh, but I think this is a terrible way to choose a programming language. It is suggesting a one size fits all approach, and I'm kind of disappointed to see a lot of languages thrown out without objective scrutiny.

Also, it could be foolhardy to pick just one for the next 10 years. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

It might help to try to think of the specific constraints that you envision running into. How can your technology choice help address those concerns and simplify your stack or speed of development, or ability to hire talent? You should easily come up with over a dozen items that you will want to be able to address with your choice of technology.

</comment><comment><USER91> What about Meteor ([https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/))? surely being funded should help longevity

</comment><comment><USER92> My guess will be he will eventually arrive at Ruby on Rails or Laravel.

</comment><comment><USER93> Not sure what kind of applications he expects to build, but picking a "Web" Framework for the next decade should probably also include a Javascript framework that allows more app-y websites. Clients are already falling for those.

</comment><comment><USER94> Judging by how fast technology is evolving nowadays I can't even imagine what is going to happen in 10 years from now... We might not even have the Web... I don't think nowadays you can choose something for the next decade. Maybe for the next 2 years Maximum!

<comment><USER5> I think the web will be around in some form just about forever. I'm more bullish on the web being around 100 years from now in some recognizable form than I am on quite a few nation states or species of mammal.</comment></comment>


True Color support in various terminals and applications - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728 <comment><USER2> Why would I want that? Serious question.

Color support is important, but 256 has served me well for decades. Can't think of a single program that would benefit from more colors. Unless, of course, you're trying to watch ASCII-videos.

<comment><USER3> Some things I can think of:

\- Themes, its nice to have the same color scheme across your programs. You can always redefine your 16 base colors in the terminal and map these to syntax in your terminal program (e.g. vi), but it's cleaner to have the rgb colors directly in your theme file, especially if you switch themes (I don't do it too often, but I like to change colors every month or so to keep it looking fresh)

\- If you code CSS, it would be nice to have preview of #336699 colors in your editor. To implement that, you need real color support.

\- And, less important, for those who play nethack-style games it's probably nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kind of a side rant but I've often wondered why Apple doesn't put more effort into making Terminal.app better. Macs are rather popular amongst certain types of developers and making their life easier is a nice way to make sure they'll keep on using Macs.

</comment><comment><USER5> How do you add something like this to ANSI ?

I'd like to add annotations to regions of the screen about which file / directory a region mentions.

In this way an aware terminal could let you open files by right clicking in the terminal, or change directory etc.

You could even run a program under the shell to check which files were opened and annotate areas if they are mentioned.

<comment><USER6> Read ECMA-48¹, which is the free (as in beer) printing of the 'ANSI' terminal controls standard. If you want to supply text (like a file name), you'd probably use an OSC command _ESC ] Ps ; Pt ST_ with a _Ps_ that no one else is using. To mark the start and end of a region, you'd probably use a pair of control sequences (CSI) analogous to START / END OF SELECTED AREA, from a private use range.

(The true-color sequence comes from an ITU recommended extension / future version, T.416². It would be interesting for the OP site to list which terminals support the full proposal, including CMY an CMYK specifications, as well as RGB.)

¹ [http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA- ST...](http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA- ST/Ecma-048.pdf) ² [http://handle.itu.int/11.1002/1000/2546-en?locatt=format:pdf](http://handle.itu.int/11.1002/1000/2546-en?locatt=format:pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait, we're settling for 24-bit color? With HDMI and modern image and video formats supporting 10-bit and 16-bit channels, I need a terminal that can support Deep Color.

True HD color with 64-bit depth, including a 16-bit alpha channel, is the minimum future programmers will demand to syntax highlight our source code and identify monsters in Nethack.

</comment><comment><USER8> iTerm 2 is supposed to have support but I'm not having any luck ([https://www.dropbox.com/s/xvl46l7ti9sqv9o/Screenshot%202014-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xvl46l7ti9sqv9o/Screenshot%202014-07-06%2016.00.08.png))

<comment><USER9> It's only in the nightly builds

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> why?

Seems completely unnecessary to me.

<comment><USER11> Terribly useful to me. For one, I can have vim themes that match my other styles in other programs.

(Not to mention we should have drawing support implemented IN the terminal by now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes! We need a website that encourages terminals and applications to use 24bit colour.

<comment><USER3> Sarcasm? I find it sometimes hard to tell around here.

But seriously, I like the meta-idea of putting up a site to promote a technology; with a list of compliant apps for users, and information how to implement it for the developers. I'm thinking about making a site that catalogues DPI aware software for windows (like Macs "Retina"), because its annoying how many programs don't support high DPI screens properly, and its notoriously hard to do for developers.

<comment><USER12> Actually, I wasn't being sarcastic.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Happy holidays, HN is holiday themed now - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't think I'm conservative, but please bring back the good old theme. And Merry Christmas (:</comment>


Could 'actual innocence' save the broken US justice system? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-35971935 <comment><USER2> Underlying causes include: in many US states, the District Attorney (chief prosecutor) is an elected position. In many US states, local judges are elected.

A major winning strategy of the last hundred years or so is the "law and order" platform, in which the politicians exploit racism, classism and even ageism to provoke fear of violent crime. The politician promises that they will increase arrest rates, win trials, and impose higher sentences in order to protect the [white, middle-class, elderly] citizens from the [black or hispanic, lower-class, teenaged] hoodlums.

And they win, and they put these policies into effect.

Do they work? Well, they work at getting the politicians re-elected, and that's the only real success criterion.

It turns out that if you ask Americans what to do about most issues, and you phrase the questions in non-aggressive ways, and you invoke empathy -- they mostly agree that treating people kindly is important. That innocence should be an absolute defense. That everyone should get necessary health care, and nobody should starve or be cripplingly poor. That people should work if they can, but not be abandoned if they can't.

But those positions are not very effective for the media and politicians, so they go with what works for their goals instead.

<comment><USER3> Not that I disagree, but there are examples of the opposite sentiment being used by elected officials during campaigns to get certain demographics to vote for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the US system really as kafkaesque as the article makes it sound? I.e. arbitrary decisions by individual officials can ruin peoples lives without a fair due process, and that the officials have a strong incentive not to be charitable?

<comment><USER5> > [...] After 414 days in the St Clair County jail, he went home.

and this is a success story. A man is free to walk after 414 days of jail because some enlightened new procedure that allows innocent people be set free before trial. Somehow reading all this I just cannot help but stare at the this number: 414. Before a trial [1].

Can this happen to anyone or do you have to enjoy a particular socio-economic situation to deserve this treatment?

[1] [http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and- courts/murder-c...](http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and- courts/murder-charges-dropped-in-east-st-louis- case/article_1ace22ff-c799-5990-98c2-bc468d227915.html)

<comment><USER6> 414 days in jail awaiting trial doesn't sound like a speedy trial to me, as required (but not defined) in the 6th amendment, either.

<comment><USER7> Defendants are often advised to waive their right to a speedy trial to better prepare a case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Polygraph? What kind of joke is this? Polygraph don't prove or disprove the innocence. It's useless.

<comment><USER9> Nor do eyewitness stories. Nor does recognizing someone from a single photo instead of a proper lineup. These are cases where there's already no reliable evidence in the first place. Really, they should go to court and it would be clear they're not guilty but the polygraph just helps shortcut it. Even better would be no polygraph and just release people when they find they don't have any reliable evidence.

<comment><USER10> "but the polygraph just helps shortcut it"

The point is that polygraphs are utter nonsense, at about the same level as reading tea leaves. Had she failed the polygraph, she'd still be prosecuted. No judicial process should have a decision point that is stochastic by design.

<comment><USER11> > Had she failed the polygraph, she'd still be prosecuted.

The article does not support that claim. It might be. But they also specifically acknoledge that polygraphs are unreliable and seem to use it mainly as a filter to deter people who are worried they might fail it, and in parallel they carry out a case review.

> No judicial process should have a decision point that is stochastic by > design.

In an ideal world, no. But adding an extra decision point where the _worst_ that can happen is that the prosecution that was going forward keeps going forward, and the best that can happen is that the case gets dropped without the ordeal of a trial sounds like a substantial improvement even if it doesn't always work.

<comment><USER10> " But adding an extra decision point where the worst that can happen is that the prosecution that was going forward keeps going forward, and the best that can happen is that the case gets dropped without the ordeal of a trial sounds like a substantial improvement even if it doesn't always work."

Uh, that's not the worst that can happen. The worst that can happen is that those who actually committed crimes are let off because they learned how to 'beat' a polygraph, or who just got plain lucky. And if you know already that your suspect is innocent, then why the polygraph?

Look I understand how adding some voodoo scapegoat to a complicated social construct can be used to change institutional mores that are impenetrable otherwise. So in that sense, I have no rational reason to discourage the use of a polygraph here; just like one can say 'if homeopathy helps people, why shouldn't they use it? And why shouldn't we finance it from the same means we finance regular health care?'. From a utilitarian point of view, there is no denying this. I maintain that it's still bad (maybe not a _net_ negative, but a negative still) to use acknowledge superstition this way.

<comment><USER11> > The worst that can happen is that those who actually committed crimes are > let off because they learned how to 'beat' a polygraph

They would also need to "beat" the case review of the available evidence. If there is no evidence, they shouldn't be convicted anyway - even if they are guilty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ... they trusted a polygraph more than the rest of the judicial process. That really doesn't say anything good about the 'normal' process, then.

<comment><USER5> "Piper says that though they know these kinds of tests can be unreliable, being confronted with the chance to take one can filter out disingenuous defendants. Regardless of the results of the test - which are inadmissible at trial due to issues with the reliability of the technology - the assistant state's attorney (ASA) in charge of the case would also perform a [...] review of all the evidence."

<comment><USER13> > though they know these kinds of tests can be unreliable, being confronted > with the chance to take one can filter out disingenuous defendants

So basically does that mean that although they don't trust the polygraph, they trust the defendant's trust in the polygraph? That seems shaky and subject to change.

<comment><USER11> No, they are saying it filters out some portion of the defendants. The article _also_ says they carry out a fresh review of the case, and:

"The ASA shall confirm that no other probative forensic testing can be conducted and that no other witnesses can be identified and interviewed," the protocol reads. "At the end of this review, if both the ASA and supervising ASA(s) either no longer believe there exists a moral certainty of the defendant's guilt or believe there no longer exists a reasonable likelihood of conviction, then the case shall be dismissed without prejudice."

So, basically: The defendant asserts they're innocent _and_ are prepared to take a polygraph _and_ there is insufficient evidence or no real prospect of prosecution anyway.

<comment><USER13> > No, they are saying it filters out some portion of the defendants.

Yes, they filter out the ones who

\- believe in polygraphs and

\- believe they would fail

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It appears from the article that if you're wrongfully jailed in the US, you're not automatically entitled to compensation for lost income and other expenses caused by the jail time. Surely this must be incorrect?

<comment><USER15> Nope, that's just how it is.

<comment><USER16> So someone's life gets ruined, job and home lost, spends time in prison due to a mistake or worse, and gets no comeback at all?

How is that not a major issue for a media campaign or politicians of one flavour or another?

<comment><USER17> Particularly surprising since the US is such a lawsuit-happy country where it seems you can expect some form of compensation even for borderline ridiculous issues. Coffee too hot? Jackpot! Life severely ruined by being wrongfully convicted? Well, sorry about that.

<comment><USER3> I believe there is some sort of automatic compensation for being wrongfully convicted in many areas, depending on the court that did the conviction. Being wrongfully jailed before conviction is a different matter.

<comment><USER15> It's rather like part of your civic responsibilities as a citizen. Like jury duty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What a ludicrous idea. Cops break into your house, arrest you for a crime you didn't commit, take months to figure out they blew it -- then what? You get a greeting card in the mail announcing that you're actually innocent? Maybe some flowers?

Sorry, no.

I support the use of force, including lethal force, on violent criminals when the public is in danger. I support the appropriate use of force otherwise. But in return for that support, there has to be some kind of feedback mechanism in place. I understand that workplace accidents happen, and nobody's perfect. But ruining somebody's life isn't the same as an IT worker forgetting his security badge one day. "Actual innocence" looks like a gimmick to make the poor rube you screwed over feel better, not evolve the system to a better state.

As bad as these stories are, my concern is for the next victim -- and the next thousand after that.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Crazy idea: let's not try to put innocent people in jail"

Man whoever thought of that is a fucking radical and needs to be stopped /s

<comment><USER5> "Then there's the fact that he had to pay the county $5 per day while he was on an ankle monitor, plus the cost of a landline to carry the monitor's signal. [...] She says they're still paying their legal bill in instalments."

Just a thought: if you're wrongly convicted, don't you have a possibility to get compensation ? But if you're case is just dismissed before even going to trial, does it mean that the authorities have no obligations to reimburse you any legal expense you might have had while planning for the worse?

<comment><USER20> Depending on who's budget that compensation comes out of, you may well just be giving another financial incentive to put/keep innocent people in jail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > "That's distinct from 'I didn't get treated fairly' [.. ] It's not, 'Some of > the evidence was obtained unlawfully, there was an incorrect ruling by the > court, [...] - no, you actually have the wrong person here...they're > actually innocent."

So there is a difference between real innocence and "we-are-not-able-to- convict-him-but-we-think-he-is-guilty" innocence? And the prosecutor gets to decide?

Then why even bother with the due process? Why not let the prosecutor decide directly? /s

<comment><USER11> No, they are saying there is a difference between a defendant saying "I did not do it" and a defendant saying "you didn't have a right to search my house, so the evidence you found there is inadmissible" or similar. E.g. the defendants asserting that they did not do the crime vs. those who assert they should not be convicted of the crime.

<comment><USER21> My point is that the distinction between "actually innocent" and "not convicted due to a technicality" basically means that due process is circumvented.

If the police doesn't have the right to search the house but does it anyway, it can now turn a person from "actually innocent" to "technically not convicted". Which is for some purposes halfway to a conviction. This means that police gets rewarded for doing wrongful searches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Only in America would 'actual innocence' be treated as a novelty!!

</comment><comment><USER23> Let Black Police deal with Black Suspects;

[http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/)</comment>


Wirecard says $2.1B cash is missing - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/wirecard-shares-plummet-as-payments-firm-postpones-annual-report.html <comment><USER2> If anyone else is curious about the earlier Financial Times reports mentioned in the article: (if these are paywalled, just google the titles)

May 2019 - What are the Wirecard allegations?

[https://www.ft.com/content/12d751e8-6c0c-11e9-80c7-60ee53e66...](https://www.ft.com/content/12d751e8-6c0c-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d)

Oct 2019 - Wirecard's suspect accounting practices revealed

[https://www.ft.com/content/19c6be2a-ee67-11e9-bfa4-b25f11f42...](https://www.ft.com/content/19c6be2a-ee67-11e9-bfa4-b25f11f42901)

</comment><comment><USER3> To mention only Wirecard misses a wider scandal and the "massive hack-for- hire" India-based operation BellTrox with hundreds of clients, as documented by CitizenLab.

[https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a- massiv...](https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massive-hack- for-hire-operation/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466119)

</comment><comment><USER4> Recent Invisibilia podcast where wirecard sends goons to terrorize a short- seller: [https://www.npr.org/transcripts/868001948](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/868001948)

<comment><USER5> Warning: trying to read the transcript instead of listening is very frustrating. Tons of words; little content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Peanuts!</comment>